Paper: an upright printer/scanner that uses a continuous roll of paper

boing
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If nothing else it sounds like a great way to build the original Turing machine.

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Ummm, no. That’s not what the Pareto principle states, and even if it did, it would be a ridiculous metric for designing either hardware or software.

Even if it’s true that most of your users only use 20% of the features 80% of the time, which 20% gets used varies widely between users - and even then, few users are going to be happy with stuff that only works for 80% of their use cases, no matter how fashionably ‘minimalist’ it claims to be.

But what if other users define “key printer functions” differently than Rensch does?

If you can’t design an easy-to-understand, pleasant product without eliminating (whatever you imagine are) “non-key” features, you’re not a very good designer.

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They should partner with Think Geek to pair it with the shrinter For some real closed loop action.

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The fantasy design that terrifies me is the magnetically levitated floating bed.
I’ve worked with powerful magnets, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that much neodymium.

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Cool you say? Are you sure? :laughing:

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I would’ve thought the Mimeograph would be more popular, given it can make more copies before fading and a new sheet can be created just by directly typing onto the paper with a typewriter.

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Awww…I was hoping for an art project that feeds a continuous loop of paper over a linked scanner and printer as a visual-feedback recursion thing.

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Mimeo is a more complicated technology, but has the advantage that you can make copies essentially forever. Ditto is very primitive, which is a good thing, but you are limited in number of copies by the amount of ink on the master.

I’ve taken legible copies off masters that were sitting for 20 years in a drawer.

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Yeah, but… why?
I could immediately suggest at least three improvements which would allow it to replace the floor sized xerox that wouldn’t require more space - however, I think i’ll wait until this doctor patents it then i’ll put three on top. Does that make me an areshole?

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I wonder how good this machine would be at printing the self-adhesive, die-cut shipping labels that constitute a good fraction of my office printing needs.

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This is your own fault for having an ass with insufficient DPI. Eat more carbs, drink less coffee.

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This is NOT a novel concept. I bought Apples Silentype printer in September, 1980, that used a roll of paper. It had a flat disk that went back and forth and used heat to print characters on the paper. You then tore off the page and cut it to the size sheet you wanted. I bought it along with an Apple 2 plus computer and then later bought an Apple 2C, which I kept and used for 12 years. I still have my print outs of those documents. Some are a bit faded but still very much readable.

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In other words, it’s using really old fax machine technology. Everything is new,if you’re ignorant of what came before.

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Just get a brother wireless laser printer and it solves most of the problems with printers.

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I have had several of these, and use one daily. Once, I tried to connect it to my WiFi network. It absolutely refused. But using an Ethernet cable, it’s a fantastically useful and trouble-free device. Way more practical than the thing that this article is about.

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Fair enough, I think it could have problems with that. Still, huge improvement over inkjet.

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